KEY FEATURES

WHAT IS THE LENOVO IDEAPAD 710S?

The Lenovo 710S 13ISK is a premium laptop in everything but price. Available for under £700, it offers all the metal build, super-slim frame, quality screen, long battery life and great performance you’d expect from machines costing closer to £1,000.

The unit I have on test is the 710S 13ISK. Other specifications will vary in terms of performance, but comments on build quality and feel apply across the range.

LENOVO IDEAPAD 710S – DESIGN AND FEATURES

This is a great-looking machine. Clad throughout with aluminium or magnesium alloy, it looks and feels every bit a high-end ultrabook. It can’t quite match the feel of being hewn from solid metal that the MacBook Air manages – because it isn’t – but it’s still a clear step up from the majority.

It’s incredibly thin and light too. Weighing 1.1kg, it’s a touch heavier than the latest MacBook (0.9kg), but then it does house a larger 13.3-inch screen and does match the MacBook for slenderness, coming in at 13.9mm.

Thanks to the use of a very thin bezel around the screen, the rest of the machine isn’t much larger either, and it’s markedly smaller than the Macbook Air.

You miss out on little in the way of key features, too. There are just a couple of USB 3.0 ports, plus an SD card reader, a headphone jack and a micro HDMI output.

Inside you’ve got an Intel Core i7-6560U processor, which is a dual-core chip with Hyper-Threading so that it can process four threads at once. More importantly, though, it includes Intel’s Iris Graphics 540, which is a surprisingly powerful integrated graphics solution, making this tiny machine capable of playing some games. This is backed up by 8GB of RAM and a fast 256GB PCIe SSD.

There’s been no obvious cost cutting when it comes to the keyboard, either. It’s nicely backlit in white and has two brightness levels, as well as the option to turn it off. The overall layout of the keyboard is also excellent, with no squashed-up or oddly placed keys. Even the key action is reasonably well defined, if somewhat shallow, so it’s easy to tell when you’ve pressed a key properly – good for touch-typing at a decent pace.

Sadly the trackpad isn’t quite so good. It’s nice and large, with a convenient click-anywhere, single-button surface. However, I found the pad had a slight tendency to stick to my fingers in a way that the very best – which often use etched glass rather than the metal here – don’t suffer from.

LENOVO IDEAPAD 710S – SCREEN AND AUDIO

The screen on the 710S can hardly be faulted. The IPS panel produces accurate, punchy colours, with satisfyingly deep blacks. Add in great viewing angles and minimal reflections on the matte finish, and it’s a great viewing experience.

The choice of a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution on only a 13.3-inch panel means you have to use Windows scaling tool to make everything look a bit bigger – and that can still be a bit temperamental.

What’s the point of having a higher resolution if you end up making everything bigger to see it? Well, it means programs such as Photoshop and video players like YouTube can still take advantage of the extra resolution to display fantastic images, but when you’re word processing or browsing the web most content still looks a sensible size.

The speakers sound fantastic. The two small speakers firing down from the front of the machine’s underside produce a surprisingly meaty sound, with a solid mid-range presence that powers things along. There’s no true bass to speak of, but it’s far less of a thin and tinny mess than you’d expect from such a small machine.

LENOVO IDEAPAD 710S – PERFORMANCE

The CPU at the heart of this laptop is a real surprise package. Its single-core performance is mighty impressive, beating out just about any other thin laptop CPU you can get with a score of 3,456 in our Geekbench 3 test. With only two cores it isn’t so impressive in multi-threaded scenarios, but its score of 7,019 is still indicative of it being entirely adequate for day-to-day duties.

What really sets it apart, though, is the Iris 540 GPU. In the 3DMark Ice Storm graphics benchmark it actually soundly beat the Nvidia GTX 950M-equipped HP Gaming 15-ak008na with a score of 78,366 to 63,000.

In truth, that’s something of a misleading result, as the CPU here is so fast that it’s pulling up the overall score. More indicative of likely gaming performance is the much more challenging 3DMark Fire Strike test where the Lenovo scores 1,319 compared to the HP’s 2,779.

Nonetheless, you’ll still be able to play 3D games on this thing if you’re happy to reduce the resolution and detail settings.

What’s more, the SSD in this thing is mighty fast, so tasks like booting up, opening programs, moving files and loading games all happen lightning-fast. We tested its performance with AS SSD and it managed 1,290MB/s read and 301MB/s write speeds. That’s 2.5x faster than a typical SATA SSD for read speed and a pretty solid write speed, too.

Combined with that CPU you get a fast system overall, which is reflected in the PCMark 8 benchmark score of 2,865. It beats the aforementioned HP (2,825) and Dell Inspiron 13 (2,732), for instance.

As for battery life, the 710S actually surpassed Lenovo’s claims, managing 8 hours 37 minutes in our Powermark benchmark. The test consists of a loop of 10 minutes of web browsing and 5 minutes of watching video, with the screen set to 40% brightness.

Obviously that figure will drop the more intensively you use this machine, but you should still comfortably get most of a working day out of one charge. All that said, there are some ultrabooks that do offer more, with the likes of the MacBook Air offering closer to 10 hours.

SHOULD I BUY THE LENOVO IDEAPAD 710S?

This is a fantastic laptop for the money. It has all the premium qualities you’d hope for from a top-end lightweight laptop, and sneaks in at under £800.

With surprisingly strong performance, a quality screen, good battery life, a decent keyboard and surprisingly impressive audio, there’s nothing major letting this machine down. The only slight slip-up is the touchpad, which isn’t the greatest but is also hardly a deal breaker.

The most obvious comparison here is the Apple MacBook Air, and while that machine does have a slightly nicer design, touchpad and keyboard, the Lenovo soundly beats it for performance and screen quality, and still comes in £50 cheaper.

VERDICT

A fantastic machine at a fantastic price. This is a great option for those seeking a top-notch lightweight laptop without breaking the bank.

I think the idea of comparing with a Mac is perfectly valid. Jimmy is correct in that people who are heavily invested in one ecosystem or the other may have brand loyalty, but many, like myself, are equally happy in either environment.

For work, I use Microsoft Office (pretty much the same on each platform) and bunch of web based software (browser based, so cross compatible). Outside of work, nearly everything I do is browser based or based on Creative Cloud, which, again, is identical on both systems.

In the days of Windows XP, I developed a preference for Macs. Windows 7 improved reliability in the Windows environment, and now, I prefer Windows 10, but that’s probably more down to familiarity. My office PC is Windows, so I spend more time in Windows and find I know my way around it better than Mac OS X Mavericks, but it’s just familiarity.

Regards the mac comparisons, because the XPS 13 is way more expensive now, it didn’t really make for much of a comparison. The Air is the closest thing for the money and is still a well known benchmark for many users (I know plenty of people that have bought Airs and installed Windows simply because for the longest time it was simply the best ultrabook).

Also, as an owner of the XPS 13 I can categorically tell you that Full HD on 13in is not usable for extended periods. For a while it’s okay but unless you’re eyesight is next level then I’d always recommend bumping it to 125%.

again with the pricing accuracy. £699 is for the core i5 variant. the i7 is £799.You need to specify the correct prices for the variants to avoid giving a misleading review.or if you have found somewhere that has given you a miraculously good offer then please share so we can all buy one!

My bad. Unfortunately these things happen sometimes. With something like this, once the mistake is made it’s so easy to miss it when re-reading as of course there is a version that costs £699.

Overall my enthusiasm for this laptop – in either variant – isn’t diminished, at least in terms of what else is available right now. Obviously last year we had the original Dell XPS 13 at the same price, and a merely updated version of that at the same price might’ve won out simply because of the slightly nicer design.

As it is, though, the latest Dell is overpriced and the 710S is a fantastic buy for the money – you’re essentially getting the £1049 version of the Dell for £799.

People don’t want to know, because if people are looking at this machine it’s because they want a windows based PC. If they are already invested in an apple ecosystem then they will choose a MacBook anyway and not look at PC’sIf I’m looking at getting a windows ultrabook, then I want to know how the top few models compare to each other to make a choice. I don’t care how they fair against a MacBook air because I don’t want an apple!I really think you guys need to go back to your roots and concentrate on solid detailed accurate reviews of actual available products, with a few news updates on forthcoming announced products. All this click bait crap on rumoured devices 12 months away that have no actual details at all, and silly articles about mobile game tips that are generally useless and add nothing new to anyone who has played these games for more than 5 minutes are just devaluing your brand. The quality of articles has really declined over the past couple of years. A simple proof read of some before publishing would be a start.I increasingly find myself looking at other sites these days to get details on products I’m interested in.

We also see that some of our most popular articles are comparisons between Macbooks and Windows machines. There clearly is an appetite from readers for this informations but you are quite correct that relevant Windows machines should be referred to also.

In terms of your other comment about the site it’s one of the dangers when expanding the breadth of content. We’re producing more high quality reviews than ever before in more content areas. I believe that quality of reviews has improved, certainly over the past year, when compared to previous years.

We do try to create informed articles about forthcoming products because some people are really interested in what might come next and want to know all the rumours in one place.

There will be content that won’t be for everyone, that’s what happens when a lot more content is being written. Pokemon Go should go away soon. Unfortunately there’s so much interest at the moment that we’d be remiss as a business if we ignored it.

The comparison is still relevant; they are both laptops after all. All the same, I do agree with you that some extra information about the Dell XPS 13 here would have been useful. I will add this to the review.